What is palm oil?

Palm oil is a type of vegetable oil that comes from palm oil trees. These trees are mostly grown on plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia and their oil is found in almost half the products in UK supermarkets, like your:

Chocolate

Shampoo

Lipstick

Margarine

Soap

So what is ‘dirty’ palm oil?

To make way for palm oil plantations, huge areas of rainforest are torn down by bulldozers or burned to the ground. In Indonesia alone, an area the size of a football pitch is lost every 25 seconds. When these forests are destroyed, local people lose their homes and amazing species like orangutans are put in danger.

Why are orangutans in danger?

Orangutans spend most of their lives in trees. High in the forest canopy they can live long, peaceful and complex lives and have relationships that are really similar to humans.

Bornean orangutan numbers more than halved between 1999 and 2015, mostly due to the expansion of palm oil plantations. When a forest is cleared to make way for palm oil, orangutans are left without a habitat. Worse still, some are brutally killed.

What is Greenpeace doing to end dirty palm oil?

In the past decade, we’ve persuaded companies including Nestlé, Unilever and Mars to sign global commitments to drop dirty palm oil in their products by 2020 – but with less than two years to go, their progress is pitiful.

That’s why Greenpeace is demanding big companies keep their promises to get dirty palm oil out of the products you use. And we need your help to pile on the pressure.